What is Godly Play?
Godly Play is a Montisorri based method of story telling, reflection, and creativity that engages children through their innate meaning making language; Play. A session includes a story, told from memory from a trained adult, a time of wondering as a group, individual work where children can use the pieces from stories and/or create with art supplies, and then a feast, where children serve one another around a simple snack.

When is Godly Play? 
On Sunday Morning’s when we are not celebrating communion, our children head up to the Godly Play Room after A Time With Children. Parents/caregivers then come up to the room after the service, and are invited to head to Fellowship Hall for refreshments. 

What is special about Godly Play? 
Godly Play creates a space for children to make meaning through story, wonder, and play. It nurtures the innate spiritual lives of children by honoring their centrality, competency, and capacity, by providing a space for exploring the mystery of God’s presence in our lives. The Godly Play curriculum engages what is most exciting about religious education: God inviting us into—and pursuing us in the midst of—Scripture and spiritual experience, and teaches us to listen for God and to make authentic and creative responses to God’s call in our lives. 

Godly Play… 

• has a Montessori foundation with 40+ years of research and practice. 
• values process, openness, discovery, community and relationships. 
• models the worship life, stories, symbols and rituals of Christian congregations. 
• allows practitioners to make relevant and personal theological meaning. 
• nurtures participants to larger dimensions of belief and faith through wondering and play. 

What does Godly Play do from an educational standpoint?
Providing structure for spiritual practice, the Godly Play method engages our innate spirituality and nourishes use of religious language to make meaning from Biblical stories through the Creative Process. Originally designed as a curriculum for the spiritual guidance of children, the Godly Play method firstly aims for fluency in the Christian language before adolescence so that children entering this next stage of development have the ability to explore their existential limits and articulate their experiences in community. 

Fluency does not mean “remembering the language as an end in itself.” Instead, a “conscious and functioning language system” develops because “religious language acts as a door into the pure coordination of actions among God, self, others and the creation.” Because language names and orders thoughts, the base language used to construct reality plays a significant role in the reality itself. Pre-language, conceptions of Self, God, Others and Nature connect and communicate directly with one another. When language is added, “the primary relationships are now refracted through the prism of the language.” In practice, the language domain influences relationships, meaning, and use of one’s knowledge and experience. 

The art of using language is acquired through modeling and immersion; words are only part of the process. Since both spoken and unspoken meaning foster full language acquisition, the environment and culture of Godly Play practice is critical—the method is much more than a clever way to tell Bible stories. The Godly Play curriculum guides participants through self-discovery, which is fundamental to the Montessori tradition from which Godly Play developed. While the Godly Play method is a spiritual practice, spiritual experiences during Godly Play sessions are actually the mechanism for “being in religious language.” These experiences serve as both a conditioner for our existing spiritual connection with God and as the instrument for grounding spirituality in the Christian language and community of religion. 

• Watch Founder Jerome Berryman’s Introduction to the Godly Play Foundation YouTube channel. 
• Then watch some of the Foundation’s YouTube story videos to get a sense of the lesson portion of a Godly Play session.